In the book it's chemicals (gunpowder) and radios. The application of radios by Vinge's version of non-anthropomorphic intelligences is especially interesting.
What about a "Mote In God's Eye" -style technology bunker? Would having a set of raw materials, instructions, and tomes of information be the ideal setup? Perhaps something along the lines of the Svalbard Seed Vault. What are the most useful artifacts that can survive A) the catastrophe and B) the length of time it takes for the artifacts to be recovered? Such a timeframe could be short or...
I might even say that it's better to explore as much of the problem's causal underpinnings as a first pass.
As a budding design engineer, one of the things that has been hammered into me is first to understand the problem in its wider context. Oftentimes just identifying a PROBLEM as opposed to a TASK is not enough: you need to understand the system that enabled the problem to exist. What aspect of the system is directly detrimental? Why is it detrimental? What features of the system influence that detrimental aspect? Why do those features exist in the firs... (read more)